Category: Books

Of True Believers and Convenient Ends

The passage below is from Gulliver’s Travels, Dean Jonathan Swift, Chapter 4. Amazingly out of copyright. [Shorely shum mishtake? Ed.]

One Morning, about a Fortnight after I had obtained my Liberty, Reldresal, Principal Secretary (as they style him) of private Affairs, came to my House, attended only by one Servant. He ordered his Coach to wait at a distance, and desired I would give him an Hour’s Audience; which I readily consented to, on account of his Quality, and Personal Merits, as well as the many good Offices he had done me during my Sollicitations at Court. I offered to lie down, that he might the more conveniently reach my Ear; but he chose rather to let me hold him in my hand during our Conversation. He began with Compliments on my Liberty; said he might pretend to some Merit in it: but, however, added, that if it had not been for the present Situation of things at Court, perhaps I might not have obtained it so soon. For, said he, as flourishing a Condition as we may appear to be in to Foreigners, we labor under two mighty Evils; a violent Faction at home, and the Danger of an Invasion by a most potent Enemy from abroad. As to the first, you are to understand, that for above seventy Moons past there have been two struggling Parties in this Empire, under the Names of Tramecksan and Slamecksan, from the high and low Heels on their shoes, by which they distinguish themselves. It is alleged indeed, that the high Heels are most agreeable to our ancient Constitution: But however this be, his Majesty has determined to make use of only low Heels in the Administration of the Government, and all Offices in the Gift of the Crown, as you cannot but observe; and particularly, that his Majesty’s Imperial Heels are lower at least by a Drurr than any of his Court; (Drurr is a Measure about the fourteenth Part of an Inch). The Animositys between these two Parties run so high, that they will neither eat nor drink, nor talk with each other. We compute the Tramecksan, or High-Heels, to exceed us in number; but the Power is wholly on our Side. We apprehend his Imperial Highness, the Heir to the Crown, to have some Tendency towards the High-Heels; at least we can plainly discover one of his Heels higher than the other, which gives him a Hobble in his Gait. Now, in the midst of these intestine Disquiets, we are threatened with an Invasion from the Island of Blefuscu, which is the other great Empire of the Universe, almost as large and powerful as this of his Majesty. For as to what we have heard you affirm, that there are other Kingdoms and States in the World inhabited by human Creatures as large as yourself, our Philosophers are in much doubt, and would rather conjecture that you dropt from the Moon, or one of the Stars; because it is certain, that a hundred Mortals of your Bulk would, in a short time, destroy all the Fruits and Cattle of his Majesty’s Dominions. Besides, our Histories of six thousand Moons make no mention of any other Regions, than the two great Empires of Lilliput and Blefuscu. Which two mighty Powers have, as I was going to tell you, been engaged in a most obstinate War for six and thirty Moons past. It began upon the following Occasion. It is allowed on all Hands, that the primitive way of breaking Eggs, before we eat them, was upon the larger End: But his present Majesty’s Grand-father, while he was a Boy, going to eat an Egg, and breaking it according to the ancient Practice, happened to cut one of his Fingers. Whereupon the Emperor his Father published an Edict, commanding all his Subjects, upon great Penaltys, to break the smaller End of their Eggs. The People so highly resented this Law, that our Histories tell us there have been six Rebellions raised on that account; wherein one Emperor lost his Life, and another his Crown. These civil Commotions were constantly fomented by the Monarchs of Blefuscu; and when they were quelled, the Exiles always fled for Refuge to that Empire. It is computed, that eleven thousand Persons have, at several times, suffered Death, rather than submit to break their Eggs at the smaller End. Many hundred large Volumes have been published upon this Controversy: But the books of the Big-Endians have been long forbidden, and the whole Party rendered incapable by Law of holding Employments. During the Course of these Troubles, the Emperors of Blefuscu did frequently expostulate by their Ambassadors, accusing us of making a Schism in Religion, by offending against a fundamental Doctrine of our great Prophet Lustrog, in the fifty-fourth Chapter of the Brundrecal (which is their Alcoran.) This, however, is thought to be a meer Strain upon the Text: For the Words are these: That all true Believers shall break their Eggs at the convenient End: and which is the convenient End, seems, in my humble Opinion, to be left to every Man’s Conscience, or at least in the power of the Chief Magistrate to determine. Now the Big-Endian Exiles have found so much Credit in the Emperor of Blefuscu‘s Court, and so much private Assistance and Encouragement from their Party here at home, that a bloody War has been carried on between the two Empires for six and thirty Moons with various Success; during which time we have lost forty Capital Ships, and a much greater number of smaller Vessels, together with thirty thousand of our best Seamen and Soldiers; and the Damage received by the Enemy is reckon’d to be somewhat greater than Ours. However, they have now equipped a numerous Fleet, and are just preparing to make a Descent upon us; and his Imperial Majesty, placing great Confidence in your Valour and Strength, has commanded me to lay this Account of his affairs before you.

I desired the Secretary to present my humble Duty to the Emperor, and to let him know, that I thought it would not become Me, who was a Foreigner, to interfere with Parties; but I was ready, with the hazard of my Life, to defend his Person and State against all Invaders.

Blefuscu and Lilliput. Two states that waged war on each other, just because they chose to eat their boiled eggs differently.  One started at the Big End, the other at the Little End.

Some of you commented on my “polarisation” piece yesterday, and I thought I’d take that particular aspect of the discussion forward. After all, it’s a bit like Blefuscu and Lilliput.

I think there are three aspects to this:

One, we’re seeing a battle between those who are technically literate and those who aren’t as yet, the dinosaurs versus the newbies.

I have witnessed and experienced many polarised debates in IT over the last 30 years, particularly since opensource became a viable option, and, ever since OSX, even including a couple of Microsoft versus Apple sessions. Yet those debates pass into insignificance when you look at the way people get passionate about the social media tools they use. And I think there’s a reason for it. It’s what Kathy Sierra called the KoolAid Point, if I remember correctly. We’re seeing something new: those who were historically not techno-literate are now finding it easy to use these tools, tools that have themselves been the exclusive domain of the techno-literate. And the newbies will not give in without a fight, they’ve moved past the point of “your system doesn’t work” to that of “my system doesn’t work”. So they’re passionate. Which is a good thing.

Two, we’re seeing a battle between those who “manage stuff” and those who “do stuff”, the management professionals versus the software professionals.

This polarisation first came into my view when I saw the opensource-versus-vendor debates open up; I was expecting the arguments to run on technical and commercial grounds, and wasn’t prepared for the venom I faced when I espoused opensource many years ago. It took me a while to realise just how many people “manage” technical matters, reducing what they do to a variant of contract and purchase order management. They are so keen to become “the business” that they forget their primary role, to advise on, construct and deliver technical solutions to business problems. Rather than outsource operations, or even segments of development, they outsource thinking. Vendors exploit this (who could blame them) and this in turn leads to polarised arguments. This is a bad thing, and needs to be sorted out. Cue VRM.

Three, we’re seeing a battle between the “deliver-fast” versus the ‘deliver-right”. 

I think it was Rupert Murdoch who said: Big won’t beat small any more. Fast will beat slow. This is probably the most contentious of the polarisations. Most people have grown up with the idea that cost, time and quality are variables you need to trade off against each other, and as a result refuse to accept the concept of faster, better, cheaper even as a possibility. Agile techniques, fast iteration and fail-fast principles get them very upset indeed. [I have been flamed more often for this particular set of beliefs than any other beliefs, strangely enough.] Much of what is the Web; much of what is Web 2.0; much of what is Social Media; all these are predicated on internet time, on functional integrity with incremental functionality, on perennial betas, on feedback loops and fix-as-we-go.

All these three polarisations are themselves cutting across the San Andreas fault running through technology (or maybe it should be the Berlin Wall). Whatever it is, the tectonic plates have shifted. The Wall has come down. There is no more a Holy of Holies where the IT industry can hide.

We’re not the first profession to face this, and we won’t be the last. Priests, doctors and lawyers have all faced this before us, and accountants are facing it now. We can all no longer use inconvenient languages and esoteric jargon to separate us and protect our professions; we can all no longer walk around saying “this is complex, you won’t understand it”; and we can all no longer act arrogant about what we do, to the detriment of our customers.

All these three polarisations are about one thing and one thing only: the customer is in control.

You better believe it.

Old Man’s River: The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N

One of the principles I’m trying to stay with in this series is to ensure that whatever I recommend is generally available; while I want to share “long tail” choices rather than “hit culture” ones, there is no point my doing so unless you can borrow it or buy it.

Recommendation 5: (Book)

The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N. The first of a pair of books by Leo Rosten, published during the late 1930s as a compendium of articles in the New Yorker. I was fourteen when I read them, and I was fascinated by the sheer talent of the then 24-year-old Rosten. He was able to make me “hear” the accents of European immigrants wrestling with the complexities of English (albeit the American kind) while adjusting to their new and exciting world.

At that point, I’d never left India myself, and my “knowledge” of the world beyond India’s borders was marginal: largely influenced by film and magazine and book, with the occasional smattering of real-live tourists. What Leo Rosten did was to conjure up the atmosphere in the English language class in a remarkable way, somehow giving me a vicarious feel for the different cultures in that classroom, the personalities, the battles, the joys and despairs.

It is rare enough for a book to be able to do this. Rarer still for one firmly placed in the “Humour” category (I cannot bring myself to spell it Humor). And even rarer for one originally written as a series of articles.

The book is easy to read, you can choose to read it stand-alone chapter by chapter, you don’t even need to read them in sequence. But if you wanted to, you could read it cover to cover in one sitting. There is some overlap with the content and style of George Mikes, another humorist I rate highly. I cannot recommend it highly enough for someone who wants to delve into the nuances of immigrant cultures in newly-adopted lands.

Applauding our own behinds

While returning from New York yesterday, I read David Rakoff’s Don’t Get Too Comfortable on the plane. Viciously funny. But that’s not the point of this post.

In a chapter entitled What Is The Sound of One Hand Shopping, Rakoff quotes the inimitable Lenny Bruce, saying:

Lenny Bruce described flamenco as being an art form wherein a dancer applauds his own ass

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I love flamenco, in all its forms. The music, the fingerstyle guitar playing, the dancing, the atmosphere. I also love what Lenny seems to be saying, which I personally interpreted as “Be careful, don’t take yourself too seriously, otherwise passion becomes pretension.”

And I think we do need to be careful. We of the blogosphere and the A-listers, the technomemes and the Dr Seuss naming conventions and the Everything 2.0, we need to make sure we don’t take ourselves too seriously. We need to recognise that we’re nothing more than a bunch of passionate early adopters participating in a big and potentially far-reaching set of changes to how we communicate.

When I see the kerfuffle surrounding the Scoble-Facebook face-off, I begin to wonder. I really begin to wonder.

Musing quietly about “literacy”

“I am always for getting a boy forward in his learning; for that is a sure good. I would let him at first read any English book which happens to engage his attention; because you have done a great deal when you have brought him to have entertainment from a book. He’ll get better books afterwards.”

James Boswell, quoting Samuel Johnson in Life of Samuel Johnson

I love that quotation; by all means replace the word “English” with whichever language you prefer, the sense is what matters to me. [Incidentally, my thanks to Joan Downs of New York, who referred to the quote in a letter to the Editor of the New York Times a few days ago, thereby making it serendipitously accessible to me for this blog post]

It was January 1972. I was in Class 8D at St Xavier’s Collegiate School, Calcutta, the school year was just beginning. We had a new form teacher, Mr Desmond Redden. (Calcuttans will understand why he was nicknamed “LalMurgi” from the day we met him). Mr Redden was unusual, to the extent he had just joined the teaching staff at the school; whereas the 40-strong class he faced were, on, average, 5-year veterans of the school, and quite used to being with each other. If the school practised streaming, it was not visible to us as students; every year, we would notice that a few students went to another class, and a few joined us. The bulk of us stayed together from infancy through to the time we selected subjects for what was then our “Senior Cambridge”, our University of Cambridge Overseas Examinations Syndicate Ordinary Levels, to give them their full name.

Anyway, to the point of this post. Mr Redden met us for the first time, and it was likely to have been more daunting for him than for us. And to break the ice for the first class of the first day, he asked a number of us what we did during the Christmas break. When it came to my turn, I told him I played games with the family, lazed a lot. And read comics. Lots of comics. Every day.

He went ballistic, and was more than just scathing about my reading habits. Made a big deal about how reading comics was a treasonable offence, how it spoilt a person’s grasp and command of the language and corrupted his writing ability. I was young enough to feel ashamed; red-faced, tears in my eyes, hot-flushed, that sort of thing. Still standing up, hoping the ground would open up and eat me alive. You know that feeling? Happened to me a lot when I was young, probably built character or something like that.

A few minutes later Mr Redden was done with the icebreaker Part 1, and went on to Part 2. Analysing his portfolio, looking at what he “knew” about the children in his care. Looks like we have a fine soccer team, can do better on the cricket, and so on. And then he said something like “I’m particularly delighted to know that we have at least one serious creative writer in the class, someone who won the school short story medal while still in Class 7, unheard of. Well done. Who is it?”

It was my turn to stand up, and yes, I was gracious in my victory. To be fair to Mr Redden, that was a one-off; he was a good teacher and kept us together and motivated for a fine school year. But his antics on day one help me illustrate the point that Johnson was making.

My parents were very liberal in their approach to children reading at home; every week, we had a man come to the house, a travelling one-man library service for books and magazines. And comics. Lots of comics. In fact our name for the guy was Comic Wallah.

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This travelling Comic Wallah was a wonderful invention for us. His name was Mullick, I think his children still run the shop on Free School Street. He was still alive and at the shop when I last went there in the late 1990s. He’d come home every week, with books (ranging from Agatha Christie through Erle Stanley Gardner and Max Brand to even Mills and Boon) and magazines (from Time and Newsweek and Life and The Saturday Evening Post through to Woman and Home and Women’s Weekly and even “glamour” mags. And comics (mainly American, but covering all the genres).

You have to imagine all this coming into a house that had a lot of books already, and quite a few magazines on subscription. And newspapers galore. [In fact, ever since I was 12, we used to have TWO copies of the Statesman delivered home, along with the Amrita Bazar Patrika and the Hindustan Standard; why TWO copies of the Statesman? So that my dad would have a pristine copy of the Times crossword awaiting him, while the other copy was first-come-first-served competed for by me, my brother Anant, cousin Jayashree and aunt Vijju).

So we were brought up to read anything first, just to establish our love of reading. We were left to our own devices to figure out what was good and what was bad, with little hints thrown our way. What kind of hints? Collaborative filters. I watched what my dad read, and followed suit. What my older cousins read. What their friends read. So I moved from Perry Mason to Pynchon, from Max Brand to Mailer, from Christie to Chaucer. My way. I read what my elders read.

And what they recommended. We didn’t have reviews. We didn’t get sold to via advertisements. We didn’t have television. While we did have commercial radio, there were no related ads there either.
Over time, we learnt what we should read and what we shouldn’t.

But.

More important than anything else, we learnt to love reading. We’d read aloud to each other; it was normal for me to walk into a room and hear someone quietly guffawing, if guffaws could be quiet. it was normal for us to “fight” to be next in line to read a book; sometimes this involved bartering favours, sometimes it could even get mildly physical.

That love of reading has stayed with me. With my siblings. With my cousins. And, from what I can see, it has found its way into the next generation. Not by force but by example.

We just loved reading. I remember when I saw a children’s film called Short Circuit sometime in the 1980s, where a robot called “Number 5” turned out to be alive. Now this robot went around everywhere muttering “give me input, give me input”. That’s how it was at home. And we so enjoyed it.

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Today, things have changed. Apparently people don’t read as much as they used to. But maybe they do, if we count all the ways people can read today. So let your children read online if that’s what attracts them, let them read comics online, news online, whatever. Just as long as they learn to enjoy reading.

While they learn to enjoy reading, teach them how to read. What not to read. How to spot poor writing. How to spot pornography. How to spot perversion. How to spot brainwashing. How to avoid all of them.

It used to be said “It is better to teach a man to fish rather than to give him fish”.

I think there is a parallel in reading, particularly in reading online. Teach your children how to filter, don’t just impose filters on them.

And all the time, help them learn to enjoy reading.

Brooding about “secondary orality’

Last night I referred to this article in the New Yorker, and promised to revert to it today. So here goes.

The central premise is worrisome for someone like me, brought up in a culture of reading: that it’s not just my biased perception, people really are reading less. Why worrisome? Because of the implications of such a state of affairs, implications that I hadn’t considered deeply enough.

Here are some excerpts from the article, let me try and encourage you to read the whole thing:

It can be amusing to read a magazine whose principles you despise, but it is almost unbearable to watch such a television show. And so, in a culture of secondary orality, we may be less likely to spend time with ideas we disagree with.

Self-doubt, therefore, becomes less likely. In fact, doubt of any kind is rarer. It is easy to notice inconsistencies in two written accounts placed side by side. With text, it is even easy to keep track of differing levels of authority behind different pieces of information. The trust that a reader grants to the New York Times, for example, may vary sentence by sentence. A comparison of two video reports, on the other hand, is cumbersome. Forced to choose between conflicting stories on television, the viewer falls back on hunches, or on what he believed before he started watching.

No effort of will is likely to make reading popular again. Children may be browbeaten, but adults resist interference with their pleasures. It may simply be the case that many Americans prefer to learn about the world and to entertain themselves with television and other streaming media, rather than with the printed word, and that it is taking a few generations for them to shed old habits like newspapers and novels.

In an oral culture, cliché and stereotype are valued, as accumulations of wisdom, and analysis is frowned upon, for putting those accumulations at risk. There’s no such concept as plagiarism, and redundancy is an asset that helps an audience follow a complex argument. Opponents in struggle are more memorable than calm and abstract investigations, so bards revel in name-calling and in “enthusiastic description of physical violence.”

As the scholars Jack Goody and Ian Watt observed, it is only in a literate culture that the past’s inconsistencies have to be accounted for, a process that encourages skepticism and forces history to diverge from myth.

We never had a television at home, and for sure that influenced my reading habits and those of my siblings. I don’t particularly like the idiot box; I tolerate it for period drama, sport and humour. Wherever possible, I’ve switched to the laptop or handheld device. Part of this switch was driven by my not liking broadcast media. But another part was this need to balance graphics with text. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but an endless diet of pictures alone creates modern cavemen.

When graphics entered the hitherto text-based world of computing, I loved it. Not by sacrificing text,  but by augmenting text with graphics. [When I speak at conferences, where listening aids are called for, I tend to use a mixture of words and graphics, a word or phrase supported by a picture or two.]

I’ve never experienced anything other than a literate culture, so I was fascinated by some of the observations of what an oral culture represented. My thanks to Halley Suitt again for pointing this article out to me, there is now something else for me to research and learn about.

Much of the article intrigued me; some of it fascinated me; and some of it worried me.

The most worrying thing, from my perspective, is the apparent increased risk of groupthink and herd instinct. I had never considered the secondary orality issue before. I think it’s so important that I’ll repeat the quote here:

It can be amusing to read a magazine whose principles you despise, but it is almost unbearable to watch such a television show. And so, in a culture of secondary orality, we may be less likely to spend time with ideas we disagree with.

The world has enough bigots and narrow-minded people and intolerant people already. I dread to think that we could be creating an environment where there will be more such people. If that is what TV 2.0 is likely to mean, then I guess I need to consider moving. To Mars maybe.